I've been spouting for months and months about how statins can treat just about anything cardiovascular, and a good many non-cardiovascular diseases, too. Now a study has shown up this view as being over the top - and I deserve a Saturday Quack myself. Publishing online in the New England Journal of Medicine, Norwegian researchers reported that, in a well-controlled study, patients with systolic heart failure failed to derive any benefit from statin therapy.

Over 5,000 such patients were randomly allocated to recieve10 mg daily of rosuvastatin (Crestor®) or a placebo. Those in the rosuvastatin group had decreased LDL-cholesterol levels (as expected), and decreased C-reactive protein (CRP) levels, too. However, over the next 2½ years there was no significant difference in the death rate from cardiovascular causes, or non-fatal heart attack or stroke, with rosuvastatin than with placebo. One good result emerged from the study. There were fewer hospitalizations for heart failure in the rosuvastatin-treated patients.

This is the first of several large-scale prospective studies of statins in heart failure to be reported. Other results will follow. It will be interesting to see if they produce a similar result. A point of interest. This sort of study wouldn't have been possible in the USA , because, as one specialist put it: "You couldn't have done this trial in the USA , because here all these patients [with ischemic heart disease] are getting statins anyway".